Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

Ask the Breakthrough Question:How can I make push-ups easier to do? Knowing that physical effort is the weakest link, ask yourself which of the ways to make a behavior easier to do will work for you. For the design phase, we turn to the three parts of the PAC model. Will improving my push-up skills make it easier to do? Not the full solution, but probably a good idea if you have the motivation. Will getting the right tools or resources help me to make it easier? Not really. There are videos that can guide you in the right way to do push-ups, but they don’t make this exercise any easier. And a trainer can’t actually do the push-ups for you. Can I make twenty push-ups tinier so the new habit is easier to do? Yes. Doing twenty push-ups requires a lot of physical effort so the best option is to make this habit tinier. There are a few ways to do this. Cutting it down to one push-up, doing a few push-ups on your knees, or doing push-ups against a wall.

Are you feeling motivated enough to learn a new skill? Yes? Great—do it. And now go to the next question. No? Next question. Are you feeling motivated enough to find a tool or resource? Yes? Excellent, make it happen. And now go to the next question. No? Next question. Can you scale back the behavior to make it tiny? Yes? Fantastic. You’re done. You can start practicing your new habit. No? Next question. Can you find a Starter Step for your behavior?

Yes? Great. Make the Starter Step your initial habit, then do more later when you feel like it. No? Uh-oh. If you said no to all of these questions, you might need to go back and match yourself with a different behavior from your Swarm of Behaviors.

those things that we feel silly for putting off but avoid nonetheless.

The important thing to remember about procrastination is that the perception of difficulty can be just as important as the actual difficulty. In addition, every day you don’t do the task, it grows in your head, which makes the task seem more and more difficult.

By lowering the bar, I was able to hack my brain.

Whether natural or designed, a prompt says, “Do this behavior now.”

But this is the crucial nugget: No behavior happens without a prompt. People respond reliably to prompts when they are motivated and able, which is exactly what makes well-timed prompts so powerful.

After all, she didn’t actually have to do the item on the Post-it; she just had to write it down. Simple.

Where a habit is located in your daily routine can make the difference

between action and inaction, success and failure.

There are three types of prompts in our lives: Person Prompts, Context Prompts, and Action Prompts.

Basic bodily urges are the most natural Person Prompts we have.

Relying on yourself to remember to do a new behavior every day is unlikely to lead to meaningful change. Ditto for trying to help someone else cultivate a habit.

This prompt is anything in your environment that cues you to take action: sticky notes, app notifications, your phone ringing, a colleague reminding you to join a meeting.

However, using Context Prompts for daily habits can be both stressful and ineffective.

I’ve learned that covering up all the other prompts makes me calmer—and more focused.

An Action Prompt is a behavior you already do that can remind you to do a new habit you want to cultivate.

You already have a lot of reliable routines, and each of them can serve as an Action Prompt for a new habit.

If there is a habit you want, find the right Anchor within your current routine to serve as your prompt, your reminder. I selected the term “anchor” because you are attaching your new habit to something solid and reliable.

behavior sequencing. You simply need to figure out what comes after what.

After I (ANCHOR), I will (NEW HABIT).

If you want to see a long list of sample recipes, check out the appendix where I share three hundred recipes for Tiny Habits. Or see TinyHabits.com/recipes.

Your Anchor must be something that happens reliably in your life.

No matter how haphazard your day might seem, I guarantee that you already have many routines that occur consistently enough to be used as an Anchor.

A fuzzy Anchor (“after dinner” or “whenever I feel stress”) doesn’t work. Make them precise.

Find an Anchor you already do in that location.

Location is the most important factor

decide how often you want to do your new habit.

and this element is less vital than the previous two—the best Anchors will have the same theme or purpose as the new habit.

To find the Trailing Edge, we look at the Anchor under a microscope to see what the end of an action looks like. This is particularly important for Anchors that are rather fuzzy.

Instead of starting with a habit you want to create and finding a place for it, you begin with the routines you already have and find new habits to plug in.

When you look carefully at your existing routines, you’ll find tiny pockets of open time that are ideal places to cultivate a new habit.

Pearl Habits because they use prompts that start out as irritants then turn into something beautiful.

him. Using her husband’s behavior as her prompt, Amy made a plan: Any time she felt defeated or attacked by her ex, she would immediately decide to do something nice for herself—listen

After I feel insulted, I will think of something nice to do for myself was her winning Habit Recipe.

By using his negative behavior to prompt positive behavior on her part, she became happier and more capable of compassion. When she moved out of that place of shame and discouragement, she was able to think more clearly.

I’ve found that adults have many ways to tell themselves, “I did a bad job,” and very few ways of saying, “I did a good job.” We rarely recognize our successes and feel good about what we’ve done.

people who embraced celebrations turned out to be the most successful at creating habits quickly.

hack your brain to create a habit by celebrating and self-reinforcing.

Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.

When you are designing for habit formation—for yourself or for someone else—you are really designing for emotions.

Emotions make behavior more automatic

rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milliseconds afterward.

Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain.

When you find a celebration that works for you, and you do it immediately after a new behavior, your brain repatterns to make that behavior more automatic in the future. But once you’ve created a habit, celebration is now optional. You don’t need to keep celebrating the same habit forever. That said, some people keep going with the celebration part of their habits because it feels good and has lots of positive side effects.

Note that this maxim doesn’t say, “Help people be successful.” It’s about feeling successful instead.

This is a one-two punch: you’ve got to celebrate right after the behavior (immediacy), and you need your celebration to feel real (intensity).

By skillfully celebrating, you create a feeling of Shine, which in turn causes your brain to encode the new habit.

Celebration would be first—because it’s the most important skill for creating habits.